Keats*

Miss Lowell Eulogizes, Analyzes, Forgives the Poet

The Book. In 1795, the daughter of a man who ran a livery stable at the sign of the Swan and Hoop, Finsbury Pavement, Moorfields, married one Thomas Keats, her father's trusted head hostler and, a year later, bore him a son, John. This boy went to school till he was 17, was then bound apprentice to a surgeon, read Wordsworth, Byron, Spenser, looked into Chapman's Homer, wrote some stumbling poetry, made friends with Editor Leigh Hunt, Painter Haydon, Etcher Joseph Severn, Publish- er's Reader Woodhouse. Although lie was only five feet high, the beauty of his countenance and the vivacity of his manners charmed all who met him; the more discerning of his acquaintance found in his verse the evidence of great talent. He, happy in the promise of the career that opened before him, enjoyed life immensely-- when he did not happen to have a sore throat.

To fortify his health, he started on a walking tour through Scotland. There the mist wetted him, the food was bad, he met "a mahogany-faced old jackass who knew Burns." While he was tramping 30 miles a day in drenched clothes for the sake of his throat, certain sharp dolts in Edinburgh published a review of his poem Endynrion, called it "Cockney Poetry," advised him to go back "to plasters, pills and ointment boxes," prophesied that his bookseller would not a second time "venture -L-50 on anything he might write." These reviews were waiting for him when he returned to England to nurse his brother Tom who, already in the last stages of tuberculosis, died soon after.

Keats, left alone, went to live with his friend Charles Brown in Hampstead, next door to a certain Mrs. Brawne "whose daughter senior," he wrote, "is, I think, beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange." He fell in love with this girl at once, she with him. Though circumstances--the increasing number of his sore throats, his intentness on his work, his need of money--kept them much apart, Keats' love for Fanny Brawne grew until it absorbed his life. One night, he rode on a stagecoach without his greatcoat, coughed a bright stain into his bedsheets. "I know the color of that blood," he said.

That winter, he lay ill in Charles Brown's house, languid with fever, able to write but little and consumed with longing for Fanny Brawne, whom he could not always see, though she lived so near. His doctor bled him often, fed him little; his illness grew fast. At last, after separation from Fanny in which he tor tured himself and her with jealous suspicions,* his friend Severn took him to Italy, nursed him through his last weeks. Wrote Severn: "He says words that tear out my heartstrings, 'Why is this ... I can't understand this' -- and then his chattering teeth." Keats died on Feb. 23, 1821.

To this familiar outline, Miss Lowell has brought new opinions, new material. She has studied old stage coach timetables, conjectured whether Keats stowed his portmanteau in the boot or had it sent by wagon; traced the influence upon his poetry of the Elgin Marbles, of an ash tree full of berries he saw somewhere, of a black eye he suffered in a game of cricket; computed how much claret he drank, examined a lock of his hair ("Such red, I think, I never saw before"), related how he received a kiss from a lady at a place called Bo Peep. In Appendix C, she prints 64 pages of "annotations and underscored pas sages in books owned or borrowed by Keats," From a vast accumulation of such industrious, minute researches and from others far larger, she has made novel interpretations:

Fanny Brawne, proves Miss Lowell, was far from the shallow, flippant, witless girl that worshipers of Keats have been pleased to style her. That she had intelligence the author infers from certain letters (never examined by any other biographer) written by Fannie Brawne to Keats' sister after his death: "Let us admit, once and for all, that Keats made a most uneasy lover. . . . It would have been small wonder if Fanny Brawne occasionally asked herself whether this exacting and excitable young man could make any woman really happy "

The Poems. Miss Lowell treats as a skilled gardener does a rosebush he is transplanting: what the world sees --leaf, thorn, flower--she deftly appraises; what few can see--the seed that springs in mystery, the slow roots thrusting through the dark of the mind to flower in beauty--she reveals with psychology for her spade. By this method, she puts the whole of Endymion through psychological reconstruction; explains why the Ode to a Grecian Urn is a "flawless example of clear, unvexed, wide-eyed beauty"; the Ode to a Nightingale "a no less perfect presentation of absolute magic"; why "Keats' whole soul was in The Eve of St. Agnes"; Hyperion she scores as "a failure"; praises the little-famed Meg Merrilies.

Friends. Some admired, some loved Keats; all were, at the last, either stupid or faithless. Miss Lowell, turn- ing them over with her spade, knows them better than he ever did.

The Significance. Miss Lowell has written a definitive biography, a task in which many famed and able gentry* have failed. Great industry, great acumen, an unmatched wealth of material--these might have enabled a writer of less brilliance than Miss Lowell to compile a biography equally meticulous. But the service she does Keats is one which involves but does not depend upon any new documents, acumen or industry; it is a service of psychological interpretation which Miss Lowell is peculiarly fitted to give, and which may well become the first canon of a new technic in biographic criticism.

While her competence as a poet equips her to understand the genius of Keats, it also seduces her to scorn prose as a drayhorse that must shamble in the path of the Winged One. As a consequence her prose frequently shambles. Clauses clink along, shod with such loose shoes as "nevertheless," "however," "perhaps," "I think," where a full stop would be a nail. She permits such pleonasms as "recollect back," "adduced by the fact," "deduced from," "from thence," "frequent if not constant in these pages." At her best, she has vigor, terseness, speed.

Dealing honestly with Keats, Miss Lowell writes herself down with equal honesty. Always she is his furious friend. She condemns his unkindnesses to Fanny Brawne, but finds an excuse for them; her heart is anguished with his troubles; her anger blazes against the clever reviewers who hurt him, the dull doctors who killed him. Then the reader, warmed, is tempted to conjecture that if this woman, with her efficiency, her fierce loyalty, her compassion, had been able to take the place of the nurse Severn hired to come every other day to the Piazza, de Spagna where Keats lay dying, she would have made him live.

The Author. Miss Amy Lowell of Boston is renowned as critic, poet. She begins her work at twelve at night, continues till eight in the morning, smokes cigars the while. She owns one of the most valuable collections of Keatsiana in the world. She has written several volumes of brilliant and brittle verse; A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed; Men, Women and Ghosts; Can Grande's Castle, Pictures of the Floating World, Legends, Fir-Flower Tablets (translated from the Chinese with Florance Ayscough), A Critical Fable. Her books of criticism are: Six French Poets, Tendencies in Modern American Poetry.

Pipes

THE PIPE BOOK--Alfred Dunhill-- Macmillan ($10.00). As all the world knows, Alfred Dunhill has a soft, white spot in his heart for pipes. In a magnificent and wondrously illustrated book, which is a valuable contribution to Pipal History, Mr. Dunhill, famed manufacturer of the world's most expensive pipes, tells his story. Sometimes with a seasoning of levity, sometimes with a spicing of the dull and, decorous, the author writes about pipes Chinese, pipes Japanese, pipes from left, right, top, bottom, and central America--in fact, pipes from all civilized and uncivilized countries. There is even more variety, for there are human-bone pipes, teeth pipes, pipes of earth, slate, ivory, glass, porcelain, amber, and finally the good old briar.

Edna Ferber

She Can Swim, She Can Dive

Edna Ferber's So Big continues to be one of the best-selling books in several years, and long after its original publication. Meanwhile, Miss Ferber, in a study, newly acquired, is at work on a new novel of Chicago life. She works as hard every day as the man who stands outside my window now and makes life miserable for me and doubtless for himself with a steam rivetter. She works harder. The period when a novel is being written, for a writer with an artistic conscience, is apparently one of the most difficult things imaginable. Doubts assail, characters will not behave, words will not marshal themselves in neat array. It is my belief that, when an author gets over this pain of production, his product becomes dull and profitless. After six years of newspaper work--years which Miss Ferber places ahead of any university courses she might have had--you would think that she could sit down at a typewriter and dash off a novel as a reporter accomplishes an assignment. Not so. For this task of writing, she trains much as an athlete trains for a race. Rain or shine, she walks several miles each day. Several times a week, she swims. She does not do things by halves. When she decided that swimming was an excellent form of exercise for a woman living in the city, she promptly secured a swimming teacher and is learning stroke after stroke. She can even accomplish a neat dive.

Perhaps all this has little to do with writing. I think it has. I believe that it is important that the public recover from the impression that writing is the mere sitting down with white paper before one and turning out a story that sells and sells and sells. After all, the element of luck has not played a large part in Miss Ferber's career. It was not luck that sold her very first story. It was simply that she was a good reporter, who had turned her reportorial experience into fiction by the process of studying the short stories of others. The Homely Heroine, in the collection Buttered Side Down, was her initial attempt at fiction and, if you will turn to it, you'll find that it's a good story still. She is an honest workman. She respects her craft. She is successful, and an artist as well. Recently I heard Sherwood Anderson, himself an artist, claim that it was impossible for anyone with respect for the craft of writing to work with great success for magazines in the U. S. This, I think, is untrue. It appears to me that, so far as actual respect for a craft is concerned, Miss Ferber and many other successful popular authors have quite as much as Sherwood Anderson.

J.F.

*JOHN KEATS -- Amy Lowell -- Houghton Mifflin (2 vols., $12.50).

*"Suspicion," says Miss Lowell, ''is a secondary symptom of tuberculosis."

*Until, now, the most enlightening work on Keats has been the scholarly Life of Sidney Colvin; the stupidest, an interpretation of the poet by Prof. H. Clement Notcutt of Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Other famed men of letters who have tried unsuccessfully to write the truth about Keats are: Matthew Arnold, Algernon Swinburne, James Russell Lowell, Stephen Brooke, the Earl of Belfast, Lord Houghton, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas De Quincey. In 1853, Keats was included in The Lives of the Illustrious; in 1857, he achieved the severe immortality of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.